LEAN THINKING – A Way Of Getting Your Company To Be More Efficient And More Effective At What It Does

Are you sick of seeing inefficiencies all over your company? And you never seem to see improvements? In today’s video, we’re going to talk about some simple systems that can make your service model significantly better. You’ll have happier customers, you’ll have happier employees and you’ll improve your cash. And here’s the icing on the cake – it’s not even that hard.

Transcript

Today we’re gonna talk about one of the most important things you can do to improve your cash. For simplicity, I’m gonna call this lean thinking. You know, and you’ve probably heard about lean at some point and Lean Startup or the Lean Movement, but all it is is a way of getting your company to be more efficient and more effective at what it does.

So one of the goals all businesses should be is deliver their service in a more effective and efficient manner. And here’s the unfortunate thing. Too many businesses don’t pay nearly enough time or effort to this issues. Now what this causes? Customers become unhappy employees get frustrated and frankly your business just isn’t doing as well as it could.

So in today’s video we’re going to talk about some simple systems that can make your service model significantly better. You’ll have happier customers, you’ll have happier employees and you’ll improve your cash. And here’s the icing on the cake. It’s not even that hard. So let me ask you a question.

Are you sick of seeing inefficiencies all over your company? And you never seem to see improvements?

So what if I could show you some simple methods that will improve the efficiency and quality of your company while improving cash at the same time? And that’s the goal of this video and it’s exactly what we’re gonna do. So let’s jump in and get started.

Hi, I’m Josh Patrick, and I’m the founder of the Sustainable Business cracking the cash flow code, tons of other programs I’m also the author of Sustainable: A Fable about Creating an Economically and Personally Sustainable Business.

So let’s get started with the problem.

Processes in your company take too long to do.

You often have quality issues that keep seem to appearing over and over and over again and they just never seem to permanently go away.

Sometimes your customers get frustrated with your business and you don’t seem to be able to get rid of the problems that are causing the customer frustrations.

And finally, you might not even know what your opportunities are.

You know, when I had my food service and vending company one of our challenges that we had was training route drivers. And we get a route driver, they go out with the trainer they would spend eight weeks out in the field with the trainer and they would go out their first day by themselves. They’d often end up being out there for 16, 17, 18 hours and before even the first week went by that they were by themselves, they’d end up quitting. And frankly, I didn’t blame them.

So one day, I was walking through my office and we had this on-going improvement program of trying to get to be more efficient at all the stuff we did at the company including how we trained our route drivers. But one day I happened to be walking through my office and we had a vending bank all set up ready to go out in a new location. We also had just hired a new driver that day. Now that vending bank wasn’t scheduled to go out for three weeks. So I had this brilliant idea, I’m not even sure it was me who had this brilliant idea. Somebody in our company had this idea.

Why don’t we train this new route driver in-house with this vending bank that we had all set up?

So instead of having our trainer go out in the field to spend eight weeks with the driver we end up spending two weeks training the person in-house. The first day they went out by themselves They didn’t spend 16 or 18 hours they actually got the route done in 12 hours. They were happier, we were happier. It took us a much less time to train. And that was just thinking about how can we make things better without having a goal?

Now I would have never set a goal saying we’re going to go for eight weeks down to two weeks and our retention rate’s going to go from 50% up to 90%. I could have never imagined that because it just didn’t make any sense to me. So this is something I want you to be thinking about and why having a quality program or a lean program in your company is just so important.

Now there’s two books I want you to read. One is “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt and the other is a book called “Scrum” by Jeff Sutherland. And both books in my opinion are really important.

Now “The Goal” is like called wack-a-mole for business. What you do is you wait for a bottleneck to appear or the biggest bottleneck in the company and you fix that problem. And once you fix that problem, then you wait for the next bottleneck or the next improvement area to show up and you fix that problem. And if you combine this with scrum where scrum is how softwares now developed I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not but Google updates their software about every three weeks and the reason is in scrum there’s a thing called a sprint which is a two or three or four week process where at the end of that process you have a product that you produce. You take the product from the backlog you put it into production and you work on it for two or three weeks.

Now there’s a magic bullet with Scrum. And the magic bullet is what I call the retrospective where you look back over what you’ve done over the last two or three weeks and said what went well, what could we improve on and how can we improve on it? Then you take those lessons that you learned in the last three weeks and you apply it to the next three weeks for the work you’re going to do.

Now, you may be thinking that makes a lot of sense, it made a lot of sense to me. But you may be thinking that Oh, I wonder how that would work it seems like a lot of work. Now you’re going to spend some time in meetings but the results you get is really good. So the last thing I want you to do is I want you to get rid of goals. I want you to replace it with minimums.

You know, when I also talk about this with new salespeople, I say what should our sales goal be? And my answer is as much as you can do but you need to have a minimum the least that you can do for success. And anything over that is great. So when you’re going with a minimum and anything over that you can actually blow that goal completely out of the world– water because you don’t have a goal in the first place. Remember my route driver. I’ve never would have set a goal for going eight weeks down to two weeks to get somebody out there.

So you’ve got some stuff about the beginning for how you could me more efficient and it comes down to the theory and constraints which is Goldratt’s book, “The Goal” and scrum, which is just some of this book, “Scrum”. I want you to read both books. I want you to think about how you can apply having a lean program in your company make it operationally doable, make it simple what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna have happier customers you’re gonna have happier employees you’ll have a better company, you’ll have better cash flow.

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About Josh

Why would you want to listen to me?

My specialty is working with owners of private businesses. It’s where I have the most interest and can add the most value. If you own a business and are interested in a coaching relationship as well as mentoring, I’m your guy.
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ABOUT JOSH PATRICK

My main focus in life is helping private business owners create a sustainable business that will last past them. I help create great outcomes using life experiences I’ve had during my almost forty years of running and being around my favorite people, private business owners. I’m a student, an entrepreneur and a curious observer of life. Read More